Gear & Gadgets —

Ars System Guide: Summer Gaming Edition

The Ars Summer Gaming Guide helps you the heat by giving you an excuse to stay …

Madness in a box

Upgrade madness brought on by video game lust—it's something most gamers know well. It gets very nasty with computers, since component makers push out updated and revised products on a regular basis, knowing that if nothing in the current crop of games takes full advantage of it already, a game that does will be along shortly.

The thing is, if all gamers were willing to accept a lower resolution, lower image quality, or both, for that game that came out yesterday, many dollars would probably be saved—or at least spent on other things, such as gas, or maybe bacon.

But that's just not good enough for some. Hardcore gamers demand more.

Gaming needs wants

SLI, Crossfire, quad-core CPUs, obscene amounts of memory, multichannel audio and speaker setups—they're nice things to have, but they're not found in the average consumer box. Gaming boxes tend to be driven by the software they'll be asked to run, and since the days of Origin's Strike Commander, if not earlier, games have pushed the system requirements envelope; in turn, this drives hardware sales. The average computer may be a straight commodity product with low profit margins, but hardware makers know they can cash in nicely on people trying to run Crysis at 1920x1200, let alone 2560x1600, and hell, they're probably the same people who were trying to get Far Cry to run smoothly at 1920x1200 just a year ago.

The State of Things

In an unusual twist in the opening months of 2008, the usual disparity in performance between the mid-range and high-end video cards became much smaller than usual. NVIDIA's Geforce 9600GT, 8800GT, and 8800GTS 512MB cards offer performance that's fairly close to the higher-end 9800GTX, while AMD's Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 further crowded the lower-end of the $150 to $250 video card market.

Summer 2008 has shuffled things a bit, but the price points remain the same. AMD's next-generation Radeon HD 4850 now does battle with the NVIDIA Geforce 9800GTX and upcoming 9800GTX+, and recent price cuts on the Radeon HD 4850 push it into $150 territory—very cheap for what is a ridiculously fast card.

Looking above the $250 price point shows the Radeon HD 4870 and NVIDIA Geforce GTX260 fighting for market share at $300. The Radeon HD 4870 looks to be the leader here, at least until NVIDIA can die-shrink their GTX260 and GTX280 this fall. Meanwhile, the true high-end has shifted from pricey single-card/single-GPU rigs to dual-GPU setups, with triple and quad GPU setups for the extreme high end.

NVIDIA's highest-end single GPU card, the Geforce GTX280, seems to lag in performance versus the upcoming Radeon HD 4870 X2 (a dual-GPU on a single card product), but those with deep pockets can think about SLI'ed GTX280's, or Crossfire'd 4870 X2's (for four GPUs total!). The fact that Crossfire and SLI continue to scale imperfectly even in two-GPU setups does leave a few blemishes in this video card picture, not to mention the fact that powering a pair of dual-GPU AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2's or NVIDIA Geforce 9800GX2's is not a task that many gamers want to undertake. If you go down the quad-GPU road, you'll quickly realize you've easily doubled the power consumption of your Gaming Box, and you aren't getting anywhere near 4x the performance of a single GPU, or even 2x the performance in many cases, plus you have to keep it cool.

What this means is that today's Gaming Boxes are in a bit of an odd place compared to the main Ars System Guide. With so much 3D performance being affordable in the main System Guide, the area for the Gaming Boxes to fit is rather narrow.

Differences

Traditionally the Value Gaming Box has fallen between the Budget Box and Hot Rod in price, but has offered nearly Hot Rod levels of gaming performance for about 75% of the cost. But this time, things are different. The performance difference between the Budget Box and Hot Rod is much smaller than it has been in the past, which leaves the Value Gaming Box on a precariously narrow slice of ground.

So is a Value Gaming Box still a viable system? We think it is, but for the couple hundred dollars more than the Budget Box, or a couple hundred dollars less than the Hot Rod, what do you get? becomes a far more serious question than it has in previous updates. When it comes to paying for it, individual builders will have to vote with their wallets.

The Performance Gaming Box comes in at up to double the cost of the Hot Rod, and is what the same enthusiast might build if he had the budget for a gaming machine that had one sole purpose in life: playing the most demanding games with all the bells and whistles turned on. This update's Performance Gaming Box is particularly significant, because it gets into territory where SLI or Crossfire is a must have despite its less-than-theoretical-peak performance improvement in many games. This means that Performance Gaming Box builders will want to carefully evaluate their individual needs before deciding which video cards fit those needs best. Calling it a souped-up Hot Rod seems inadequate, as the implications of dealing with multiple GPUs go far and wide, from the simple performance improvement to a beefier power supply, case cooling, and motherboard compatibility.

Ultimately, for the serious gamer who wants to play the latest titles at high-resolution, the Performance Gaming Box may be perfect. For those who demand Hot Rod performance but lack the budget to live on the bleeding edge, the Value Gaming Box is the place to start.

We try to keep the cost of the Value Gaming Box below $1,250 and the Performance Gaming Box under $3,000.

Gaming gadgets

Necessary, or at least potentially necessary accessories for the Gaming Boxes include steering wheels, joysticks, and, for the truly elaborate, entire seats.

For steering wheels, joysticks, and pedal sets, the Logitech G25 is well-reviewed and well-received, although it carries a price tag to match. The Saitek X52 Pro joystick and PZ35 Pro Pedals are also recommended as a replacement for those of us who remember the days of 15-pin gameports and the CH Flightstick Pro and Thrustmaster F-16, although they lack the massive complexity of the fancy Thrustmaster system (hooray for USB!). The CH Products Flight Sim Yoke USB and Pro Pedals are useful for the less ambitious.

Fancy mousepads get some attention, too. The fUNc Surface 1030 and Xtrac Ripper XL are quite popular, particularly when paired with a nice mouse such as the Logitech MX518, the Razer Deathadder, or the Razer Diamondback. Most of us in the Orbiting HQ are sworn keyboard-and-mouse users for most of our gaming these days, mainly because we started honing our gaming skills years ago, from the early days of Wolfenstein 3D to Doom to the current addiction of the month.

If this list hasn't changed much since the last update, that's because it really hasn't. It's good to know some components don't need an upgrade every year!

Hop on over to the Gaming forum on the Ars Openforum for more discussion about what goes well with games.

Recommended operating systems

The only practical choice for a gaming box is Windows. The various flavors of Linux and other OSes will run well on these boxes, but face it: PC gaming is a Windows thing. XP Professional is going the way of the dodo, but that's okay as Vista runs games just fine. As a plus, 64-bit driver support to Windows Vista seems to be updated much more often than XP Professional x64 for things like NVIDIA and AMD video cards.

Windows Vista Home Premium

Vista Home Premium has Aero Glass, Windows Media Center, and a whole host of nice features. Being the latest version of Windows means it gets all of the latest driver updates for gaming goodness.

Windows Vista Ultimate

The fully loaded edition of Vista brings Aero Glass, Windows Media Center, Windows Complete PC Backup, Remote Desktop Connection, and a host of features not seen in lesser versions of Vista. Gaming Box users may not need all of these features, but they're nice to have.

Conclusion

We realize some of the calls we made below will be controversial; the video card choices picture in particular looks like it will be constantly changing over the next few months, as both NVIDIA and AMD release the rest of their next-generation products, ratchet up clock speeds, and continue to update their drivers. Keep an eye out the current situation and the games you'll be playing, and build your personal gaming box accordingly.